#893 - #914 - Stuff in Sydney
Second stop of of my trip east (first stop was meeting my brother and nephew after they’d finished work for the night and were on the way home). My dad drove me around a couple of my old seashore haunts, including Bare Island at La Perouse.
The fort on Bare Island was built in the 1880s, and redundant by 1902. Worse, the contractor who made it was so criminally incompetent it was falling to bits before it was even finished. The Royal Commission investigating the fiasco were even reluctant to refer to the material as concrete. That said, it’s still a nice place for a visit, when it’s open for tours, and their National Park staff were lovely, back when I was growing up out this way.
Apparently they filmed parts of Mission Impossible II here. I haven’t seen it.
Off in the distance on the other side of the entrance to Botany Bay is Kurnell, where Captain Cook first came ashore in Australia. The bay was named after his expedition’s scientists ( including Sir Joseph Banks ) saw the flora of the area and completely lost their shit (although Cook originally called it Sting Ray Harbour). There’s also a very large chemical refinery over that side, from which the jetty runs to tanker ships.
The stone tower was a Customs building, built in 1820 - it was the first building in the area.
La Perouse itself is named after the French explorer Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, whose two ships arrived in Botany Bay a few days after Captain Arthur Phillip arrived with the First Fleet to set up the penal colony in 1788. The meeting was cordial, and Lapérouse sailed off into the Pacific and was never heard from again.
Little Bay, Sydney, and the next stop. I used to walk from my paternal grandparent’s place to here regularly, not least because my grandmother worked at the hospital that backed onto the beach here. The Prince Henry Hospital started off as a smallpox treatment camp in 1881.
My dad used to be a member of the Little Bay Tigers, an informal spearfishing club, here. Rockfishing remains excellent but dangerous.
Then the hospital got sold off to be made into luxury flats, some of which sold for 2 million dollars and are already being destroyed by the salt spray coming off the ocean. Morons. The Coast Golf Course doesn’t seemed to have changed though. I vividly recall high school golf at the other course near here, when I sliced the ball off into the rough on the landward side of the fairway, and it hit a boulder, ricocheted in a beautiful arc back across the fairway, and vanished into the Pacific. We stood on the edge of the cliff and gazed solemnly off into the depths, impressed by the perfect dreadfulness of the shot.
Little Bay’s only claim to fame took place in 1969, when international artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude created the world’s largest sculpture at Little Bay called: “Wrapped Coast - One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia”. Australian artists and students volunteered to assist them wrapping 2.4 kilometers of coastline, 46 to 244 meters wide, and up to 26 meters high at the northern cliffs, in fabric.
#893 - Phyllopteryx taeniolatus - Weedy Seadragon
photo by Richard Ling
One of the these was probably the most awesome thing I’ve ever found beachcombing. They’re large relatives of the seahorse, found along Australia’s southern shorelines. They get up to 45 centimeters long.
They don’t have the prehensile tail of seahorses, but like seahorses, the male broods the eggs, which are glued to a patch under his tail.
There’s two other species of seadragon - the Leafy (Phycodurus eques), and the Ruby (Phyllopteryx dewysea), which was only described this year from the Western Australian coast..
#894 - Hormosira banksii - Neptune’s necklace
A distinctive Brown Alga found in rockpools in Australia and New Zealand. The branching strings of hollow water-and-gas-filled beads have a slimy layer which conserves moisture, and pop off satisfyingly when squeezed between your fingers.
There’s an unattached form of this seaweed found in mangroves that reproduces from broken fragments. The attached form squeezes out its clusters of eggs or sperm in sticky masses, synchronized with its neighbours.
#895 - Sturnus vulgaris - European Starling
The first bird I saw on the NSW trip that I haven’t described before. It’s one of Sydney’s most common birds. Unfortunately, it’s also an introduced species.
The species can be beneficial to agriculture by controlling invertebrate pests - but they also feed on fruit and sprouting crops. In Australia they were introduced to control agricultural pests in 1857, and because they were believed to be Flax pollinators, but by the 1920s they were rightly considered pests. At least those responsible had slightly better intentions than Eugene Schieffelin, who introduced Starlings to North America because they were mentioned in Shakespeare.
They’ve been kept out of Western Australia, partly because they get blasted out of the sky the moment they’re seen, but mostly because of the Nullabor Desert slowing their relentless spread. Oddly enough, the species has declined in numbers in parts of its native Europe due to fewer grassland invertebrates for feeding to chicks.
#896 - Austrocochlea constricta - Zebra Periwinkles
According to the Atlas of Living Australia, the Common Periwinkle (common over here, anyway) and the Zebra Periwinkle, are the same species. Apparently A. porcata is a synonym of A. constricta - this was something of a surprise to me, since the zebra stripes of these shells are absent on the ones I knew as A. constricta.
Common grazing snails in and around tidal rockpools, on our rocky coasts.
Little Bay, Sydney
#897 - Bembicium nanum - Striped-mouth Conniwink
Superficially similar to the Zebra Periwinkle, but the shell is more conical, and wider than tall. Like that other species, an inhabitant of tidal rockpools. Unlike the Zebra Periwinkle (a Trochid), this one is in the Littorinidae
Bare Island, La Perouse, Sydney
#898 - Cellana tramoserica - Variegated Limpet
The variegation refers to not only the colour of this very common south-eastern limpet, but to the changing shape of the shell depending on how exposed a position it’s living in. Flatter shells are found subtidally or close to the seaward edge of rock platforms, and high-profile shells live higher up the shore. This is the result of two different pressures - resistance to waves and resistance to desiccation. Shells on the seaward edge of the rock platform face stronger wave action, and lower shells cope better with high wave forces. Higher up the rocks limpets clamp down more tightly to prevent water loss, pulling the mantle (which secretes the shell), closer to the body. Thus the shell grows taller.
Herbivores that graze of the rock surface when the tide is in. They’re extremely efficient at stripping all microalgae and spores off the surface, and the major factor in keeping intertidal rock surfaces bare of algae.
Little Bay, Sydney
#899 - Dicathais orbita - Cart-rut Shell
AKA Cart-rut Murex. A large predatory, cannibal and scavenger snail, common on Australia’s southern coastlines - over here around Perth they’ve been seen killing Turban Snails (Turbo (Ninella) torquata), which are several times their size.
An interesting example on a clime species, too - on the east coast it has deep angular grooves in the shell, but as you move anti-clockwise around the coast it becomes smoother, with irregular grooves (and was called Dicathais textilosa), and by the time to get to WA it has no grooves at all, but does have bumps and nodules (and was named D. aegrota).
As it happens, i stopped by that Halls Head beach again, once I was back in Perth. The tide was very low, exposing limestone rock platforms I hadn’t even known were there. And they were thick with small Cart-rut shells, of the smoother kind found over here.
It couldn’t have been very pleasant for the other molluscs on these rocks, being outnumbered by your predators.
Phillips,
Campbell and Wilson (1973) concluded that the variation is the result of water temperature, diet, substrate and degree of exposure to wave action.
Little Bay, Sydney
#900 - Diodora lineata - Common Keyhole Limpet
Resembling a True Limpet, but unrelated. The Keyhole or Slit Limpets suck in water around the edge of the shell and exhale it through the keyhole or slit. Most species feed on algae, but some, including certain Diodora, prey on sponges. I don’t know if this is one of the carnivorous species.
The Fissurellidae are found on and under rocks in oceans worldwide, but this species is found on Australia’s eastern coasts.
Little Bay, Sydney
#901 - Granata imbricata - False Ear Shell
AKA imbricate margarite, tiled false ear shell, or true wide-mouthed shell. Small pale shells resembling abalone, but lacking the lines of breathing holes all abalone have along the outer edge of the whorl. The inner surface of this one isn’t as pearly, either, but that’s only because this individual appears to have been rolling around in the surf for a while. Fresher specimens are more pearly inside, and have tiny red dots on the top side.
The Chilodontidae are mostly small deepwater snails, making this one even more unusual. Native to SE and SW Australian coastlines, where it lives on and under rocks.
Little Bay, Sydney
#902 - Nodilittorina pyramidalis - Pyramid Winkle
Found very high up in the Splash Zone, even more so than the blue periwinkles common on Australian coasts. Sometimes they’re found up to 10m above the high water mark.
I don’t think I’ve ever noticed this species before, which is odd, since they’re not uncommon (but don’t seem to have a widely used common name). Like the blue periwinkles, grazes on algae on the rock surface, whenever it’s safe and wet enough to emerge from their shell.
Found from Yeppoon south to eastern Victoria.
Little Bay, Sydney
#903 - Patella (Scutellastra) chapmani - Chapman’s Irregular Star Limpet
A common star limpet on Sydney’s beaches, with a lopsided shape. These two, that I spotted in among other seashells in a larger photo, are quite small, but they don’t get above 4cm in size.
Common at low tide level, and subtidally, along Australia’s southern and SE coasts. It’s believed they only eat coralline algae. The shell shape varies widely in this species. In exposed positions they’re flat with strong ribs,while those from sheltered environments are taller with weaker ribs and the star shape is less pronounced - note the one at the very right of the second picture.
#904 - Trichomya hirsuta - Hairy Mussel
AKA greenling and the kelp greenling. An important species on Australia’s southern and eastern shores, where it grows in large beds providing habitat and food and many other species. Edible, but known to accumulate heavy metals and other pollutants - it can be used to monitor such.
In Lake Macquarie, thick growth of these mussels blocks condenser pipes at the power station.
Little Bay, Perth
#905 - Eudyptula minor - Fairy Penguin
Photo by JJ Harrison
Also known as Little Penguins, Little Blue Penguins, and kororā. Native to Australia and New Zealand, but occasionally seen in Chile.
I really should have put this one in a few entries earlier, since Bare Island and Congwong Beach are the only time I’ve seen one in the wild, although there is a good-sized population of some 500 pairs on Penguin Island, a short swim from the coast near my home here in Perth, making this one of the few places in the world where you can get coral and penguins on the same beach.
Anyway - decades ago, at Congwong Beach, a penguin staggered ashore. This was pretty unusual, although there’s a small threatened population at Manly on Sydney’s North Shore. It was also pretty obviously unwell. My brother and I ran down to Bare Island to get the National Park rangers, who, with the help of some of the people swimming at Congwong, managed to corral the bird, put him in a cardboard box, and race him off for medical care at Taronga Zoo on a motorbike. Sadly, it was too late - the poor little thing didn’t survive, and was apparently starved almost to death when we found it.
Feral predators and domestic animals such as dogs, cats, foxes and stoats are a horrendous threat to fairy penguin colonies - one colony in Victoria was reduced from 600 penguins in 2001 to less than 10 in 2005.
Captive individuals can live for 25 years. Wild animals average 6 and a half. They nest in burrows that they either dug themselves or that were excavated by other species, or in caves and rock crevices, under logs, or in and under man-made structures including buildings, nest boxes, pipes, and stacks of wood or timber.
#907 - Champia compressa - Peacock Seaweed
One of the features at Little Bay is a swimming pool built for the use of nurses from Prince Henry Hospital. There’s a good number of such ocean pools along Sydney’s coast, but the one at Little Bay was built from piled up boulders, and has been disused for so long that it’s little more than a rough circle of rocks sticking up out of the water. That said, it is deep enough and sheltered enough that some interesting species live in it - and it shits me to tears that I didn’t get a good photo of one of the prettiest, especially since I can find only three good photos of it online.
Champia compressa is a Red Alga, and if you take it out of the water it’s a fairly ordinary orange-red frond, but underwater it shimmers with a brilliant blue and green iridescence. I have no idea what benefit, if any, it derives from this. There’s not much info on it online, either, but I’ve found it in Sydney, and it’s also known from Western Australian waters, but only from the lowest tidal zones.
Photo of it here.
#908 - Heliocidaris erythrogramma - Purple Sea Urchin
The fragment of one, anyway. Sydney’s most common sea urchin, usually seen nestled into cavities they’ve made in the sandstone, and frequently using shells or seaweed as a sunhat. Found on rocky shores on the southern half of Australia.
A few tiny tubeworms have built their tubes on this fragment of test, too.
Little Bay, Sydney
#909 - Scutus antipodes - Elephant Snail
photo by Constance
Also known as the Boat Shell, Duckbill Limpet, Elephant Slug, and Shield Shell, after the large off-white rectangular limpet-like shell, that remains exposed as the huge slug-like snail crawls around. They’re actually giant keyhole limpets, although this genus don’t actually have a keyhole in the shell - it’s not like they can retreat underneath it, so don’t need to breath through a tiny slit anyway.
Edible, and common, but rarely seen in daylight - usually hides under rocks and ledges on all southern Australian and New Zealand coastlines, emerging to eat seaweed at night.
#910 - Galeolaria caespitosa - ‘Sydney Coral’
Photo by Sea Kangaroo
Another distinctive tidal-zone-marking species, forming thick white crusts of millions of tubeworms, from the lowest neap tide high-water mark down. But individual worms might be found even in the splash zone. I suspect those tiny tubeworms on the purple sea urchin were the same species.
When underwater, the tubeworms extend a tentacled crown to use as gills and to catch passing food particles.
This Serpulid is found on rocky shores from Queensland, a south and west to WA. Also abundant in New Zealand.
#911 - Pyura praeputialis - Cunjevoi
These are not the most prepossessing of animals - in fact, it’s hard to tell they’re animals, or even alive, at all. At low tide, rock shores all around Australia might reveal thick mats of these large, brown, leathery algae-encrusted lumps, each with two well-concealed holes at the top.
They are, in fact, relatives of the vertebrates.
Cunjevoi (an Aboriginal word for this and two related sea squirts that form part of the P. stonolifera complex) are sessile tunicates. The larvae ( protected by a foam nest, the first such nest discovered in use by a marine animal) are tadpole-like, but soon settle down, digest their own brain, and spend the rest of the lives filtering sea water. To further complicate matters, tunicates use a lot of cellulose in their bodies.
The bright orange-red flesh is edible, but these days it’s usually used as bait.
(Oddly enough Cunjevoi is also the name of a poisonous rainforest plant - I don’t know if there’s a connection)
#912 - Phascolosoma noduliferum - Peanut Worm
Another species that I failed to get a good photo of, but that are interesting enough that I don’t care.
Phascolosoma is a genus of small, thick, brown, rough Sipunculid worms, that really do resemble peanuts, but which can extend their head (and attendant mandibles and tentacles) out quite a distance when they’re hunting for prey. Phascolosoma noduliferum is a native of Australia’s southern coasts, where it lives under rocks or in shelly sand and gravel. I’ve found them in deep tide pools, where the surf can crash over the rocks. They’ll also live among ‘Sydney Coral’, and down to around 1500m.
Sipunculids don’t seem to have changed much since the Cambrian explosion - they’re not uncommon, even in shallow water, but most live in burrows or discarded shells, so aren’t seen. Some even bore into rock. The first species was described in 1827. A related species was later described as Golfingia macintoshii by E. Ray Lankester - who dissected the specimen between rounds at Saint Andrews golf club in Scotland.
#913 - Trichoglossus moluccanus - Rainbow Lorikeet
This a terrible photo of a Rainbow Lorikeet - but given that the pair of them were crashing around in the Banksia at Little Bay, and I needed to get back to the airport to fly to Wagga Wagga, I didn’t want to linger for a better shot. (It’s a pity I didn’t have a better photo - they would have made a great #900)
Photo by Cygnus Insignis - these are two of the introduced ones in Perth
Common along the eastern seaboard, in rainforest, coastal bush and woodland areas. Some rainbow lorikeets, formerly considered subspecies of this one, are found on overseas islands.
Adapts well to the presence of humans, and can be hand-fed (although bread soaked in honey is a terrible substitute for the fruit, pollen, nectar they actually eat). Their tongue is covered in ‘hairs’ that make collecting nectar and pollen much easier. They also tickle when stuck in your ear.
Accidentally introduced into Perth’s central suburbs in the 1960s, and now a pest. Deliberately introduced into Auckland’s suburbs in 1990, by a fuckwit.
#914 - Dandelion Leafminer
Typical Leafminer damage to a Sonchus oleraceus (common sowthistle) usually called a dandelion over here in Australia, spotted on the way to the airport.
A likely culprit is Chromatomyia syngenesiae - the Cineraria or Crysthanthemum Leaf-mining Fly. Feeds on a wide range on Asteraceae (just look at the length of known hosts here), but has also been reared from Daucus (Apiaceae) and Pisum (Fabaceae).
Matraville, Sydney. Matraville is named in honour of James Matra, an American sailor and diplomat, who was a midshipman on the voyage by Captain James Cook to Botany Bay in 1770. Matra had walked over the area with Cook and his close friend, botanist Joseph Banks, and later proposed to the British government that it establish a colony at Botany Bay, which he envisaged would also appeal to American loyalists.